I was thinking along the line of how revolution does it, just not sure how that is done?
Robert Mann -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bill Marriott Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 7:37 PM To: use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Subject: Re: how to implement a activation code? There are many, many ways to do this. Some of them would involve the standalone "phoning home" to a server which, would enable or disable the software. Another method would be to encode the expiration date into the activation code itself. For example if you wanted it to work the way Revolution does, with a user emailing in to request a key. The code "knows" when it expires. A third way is to hide something in the registry (Windows) or somewhere on-disk where it's not easy to be found. Here's a very very simple (and thus, easily "cracked") algorithm: suppose the expiration date is "8/2/06" the result of base64encode(compress("8/2/06")) is H4sIAAAAAAAAA7PQN9I3MAMAKw61YwYAAAA= 8/3/06 is H4sIAAAAAAAAA7PQN9Y3MAMATmkJ2wYAAAA= 9/2/06 is H4sIAAAAAAAAA7PUN9I3MAMAjt3pqAYAAAA= 11/24/09 is H4sIAAAAAAAAAzM01Dcy0TewBAC5rlHDCAAAAA= Not that while some characters are the same, there's no "obvious" human-readable pattern. Also, it turns out that the "H4sIAAAAAAAAA" prefix and the "AAAA=" suffix are the same for all values encoded this way. So, your activation code could be: 7PQN9I3MAMAKw61Yw In the standalone you would add use something like put "H4sIAAAAAAAAA" into daPrefix put "AAAA=" into daSuffix put decompress(base64decode(daPrefix & daCode & daSuffix)) \ into daExpireDate if daExpireDate > the date then answer "Your trial period is over" quit end if There are many other, better ways you could "encode" a date (and other information) into an activation code. This is just one idea. The simplest code of all could be just three letters: numtochar(month + 32) & \ numtochar(day+ 32) & \ numtochar(year - 2000 + 32) Of course, people might guess that. "Robert Mann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Is there a sample of how to implement a activation code and or a limited > number of trial days with a standalone build? > > > Robert Mann _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution